South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  “You’ve grown a lot in the last few months,” she said after awhile. “How was it here by yourself for those weeks?”

  He swallowed the mouthful of oatmeal before responding. “It was kinda nice. I wasn’t really alone, after all.”

  “Oh?”

  “With the whole village watching me, it was hardly like I was alone, now was it, Mother?”

  She smiled into her bowl at his carefully gentle tone. “No, I suppose not. Still. You spent a lot of time on Sandy Long.”

  Otto’s mind cast back without his volition at the reminder. “Yeah,” he said after a few heartbeats. “It was pleasant. Odd, but pleasant.”

  “Odd, how?”

  He shrugged. “How many times had I gone down that beach with Father? Hundreds?”

  She smiled. “Probably.”

  “Well, that first day on my own, I guess I got a chance to really see it. We were always picking up stuff and looking it over. He’d throw stuff in his bag. I always tried to get him to tell me what we were looking for and he never really did. And I never really saw anything.” Otto’s voice trailed off, remembering his first morning alone on the beach. “Once I saw an otter in the wood he held up. That was the only time I ever had any idea of what he was doing, and I was never able to see anything else.”

  “In the wood?”

  “Yeah, it was a trick of the light or something, but when he held it up, it was like I could see the little otter in there, floating on its back. Sounds silly now.” He felt the heat rise in his face.

  His mother smiled. “Not at all, hon. All the great sculptors in the universe have said, at one point or another, that they could see the sculpture trapped in the medium. Why should you be any different?”

  “I’m no good with the knife, though.”

  “Who says?”

  “I do. I’ve carved and whittled and cut and everything. It’s always the same. I get a raggedy piece of wood that’s just kindling!”

  “Maybe you had the wrong piece of wood. What were you trying to carve?”

  He paused. “I don’t know.”

  “That might have been a problem. Maybe you got kindling because that’s what you were carving. Try carving something else.”

  “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever’s in the wood. You have to find a piece that looks like something, I should think, and that’ll be what you should try to carve.”

  Her reasonable suggestions and tone calmed him. “Okay, I can try that.”

  “Get your father to help. He’s an excellent carver.”

  Otto had to agree with that. His father carved very smooth and realistic renditions of the various animals. His inlay work looked like the purple shell had grown there on its own.

  “It’s not like he hasn’t been trying to help,” Otto said. “It’s just—sometimes his suggestions don’t give me much to go on. ‘Feel the grain with the knife’ doesn’t exactly help.”

  “Yes, I can see where that might be. Just keep practicing. It takes a lot of practice to fine tune a skill like carving. Any skill, really. Even financial analysis. And I better get back to my practice.” She collected her dishes and stacked them in the sink before taking her place at the terminal.

  “What is it you do exactly, Mother?”

  “I deal with markets and prices, trying to find the patterns that will let us get the best deal for our products.”

  “How do you do that from here?”

  “It’s all on the ’Net. I can watch the commodities exchange here and see what’s available for sale and at what price. I make recommendations on what to put for sale and how much to charge. I tell Alan Thomas’s office and they handle the transactions in the name of Pirano Fisheries.”

  He finished his breakfast and went to look over her shoulder as he’d done dozens of times before, but he took a moment to try to understand what he saw–as if it were some odd electronic beach. Various windows, lists, icons, and scrolling data cluttered the screen. “How do you make sense of all that?”

  She laughed. “Well, it took a lot of practice. Just like carving. This area here,” she pointed to a block on the screen, “holds the goods we have for sale. If I click on one of the shipments, like this cargo of frozen mouta fillets,” she clicked and a little pop-up window showed who provided the cargo, what the cost was, and an expiration date. “We need to move this before that date and ask more than it’s costing us. If we ask too much, nobody will want it. If we ask too little, they’ll think there’s something wrong with it.”

  “Why doesn’t Pirano just set a price? You can’t tell me that they don’t know how much it costs to catch a kilogram of fish.”

  “They do set a base price and almost all our product is covered by big contracts. These shipments are extras and we can’t go below the base price, but they also recognize that some catches cost more, and depending on seasonal influences, may be worth more on the market. We can sell our stuff to the commodities exchange for the going price, or we can try to make the best deal we can by going directly to the brokers up in the orbital. That’s what Meemaw does these days. Acts as a broker. She handles mostly grains and beans in bulk, but she knows what to look for. I get messages all the time from her to look at this or that.”

  “What’s this other stuff?”

  “Over here, we have the shipping schedule for the ships on inbound courses to the orbital, along with their next two ports of call. After here, they almost always go to Dunsany Roads or Margary. Occasionally, an indie will jump in out of the Deep Dark and collect a cargo of foods and take a long jump back out, cutting across the main shipping lines by doing double or even triple jumps.”

  Otto felt eyes starting to glaze.

  “Here’s where I have a feed of the news from around the sector. Most of it’s financial, and much higher level than anything we really need to concern ourselves with, but occasionally, it points to some business opportunity, or economic condition that we can either protect ourselves from, or take advantage of.”

  Otto read the current story about how food prices were rising on Dunsany Roads because of the failures of fishermen and farmers to make their production quotas on St. Cloud. The story said that other sources of food were available and that the market was waiting to see how the season played out, but that performance of Pirano Fisheries and Allied Agriculture stock prices was “soft,” whatever that meant.

  “Feels odd, reading about yourself like that.”

  “Yes, it does, but not all of it is about us.” She scrolled through stories about the call for deep space construction workers over in Margary, a change in tax reporting regulations from the Sector Authority on Dunsany Roads, and the projected demand for new clipper construction based on population expansion within the Confederation.

  “How do you know where to look?” he asked, feeling overwhelmed by the flow.

  “You don’t, always. Mostly it’s a matter of paying attention to detail and seeing what bigger shapes the details reveal. Kinda like seeing the carving in the wood.”

  He laughed and returned to the table to clear his dishes away. Outside, the sunlight reflected from the new snow on the frozen ground. He sighed. “I miss fishing and my walks on the beach.”

  “Well, you could still fish, but the water is so cold. It would be brutal, just collecting bait from the rockweed. If you bundle up, there’s no reason you couldn’t take a walk down Sandy Long on a nice day like today. Just don’t stay out forever, and keep an eye on the weather. It changes fast.”

  Otto considered it briefly and decided he’d rather take a frozen stroll down the beach than sit alone in the shop fighting with the carving. He felt the need to get out and stretch his legs as a kind of pain. He went back to his room, added a few layers of clothing to his garb, and slipped on his heavy boots. He checked to make sure his grandfather’s knife was safe in an inner pocket, and took up his walking stick before leaving the room. Over the course of the autumn, he’d picked up more bits and pieces to decorat
e his staff, including some natural beads in the form of broken and wave-worn shells. They made a soft chiming, tinkling sound as he walked.

  As he came back to the kitchen, his mother nodded to an insulated bottle on the counter. “Hot tea with honey, honey,” she said. “Slide that in your inner pocket and it’ll keep warm for a couple stans, even out there.”

  “Thanks, Mother.” He was surprised and grateful for the small kindness. He wouldn’t have thought of doing it for himself, let alone for another. He shrugged into his heavy coat, pulling a woolen cap and heavy mittens out of the sleeve as he did so. The hat had a long tail down the back, ear flaps, and a leather outer shell. The dense wool provided insulation, and the leather cut the wind so it couldn’t steal the warmth. Likewise soft wool lined his mittens which had a supple leather outer shell. He felt like he weighed an extra ten kilos as he reached for the door, his extra clothes making him waddle. He made his way to the shop and stopped for the collection bag before heading up the trail. By the time he reached the far side of the headland, his heavy clothes had settled and he was moving easily.

  The winter sun—low in the sky and casting little heat—reflected from sand, snow and water, stabbing diamonds into Otto’s eyes. He squinted against the glare, tears flowing from the combined assault from sun and wind. He lowered his head and turned it against the wind as he picked his way down the path to the beach proper. It felt like weeks since he’d been out. The sand was surprisingly clean. High winds and higher waves combined to sweep the larger bits clear. High on the beach, a narrow band of flotsam and the half frozen sand gave fairly good footing. Lower on the beach, the wind was still strong, but he was able to protect his face by keeping his head down. Looking down at the sand kept the stabbing rays of the sun from dazzling him as well. His gaze scanned the beach, but he knew there were more bits of wood than his father would be able to carve all winter already stored in the shop. He felt no compulsion to collect more, even though he had the bag, just in case. He struck off down the beach, gaze downcast and scanning the storm wrack scattered here and there across the sand.

  He walked quickly. The exercise soon warmed him, if not thoroughly, then at least at his core. The cold stung his face, but it wasn’t terrible. The day became bracing instead of freezing. As he walked, he thought about his mother cruising through the depths of the ’Net, looking for deals, watching the news. She’d been a fisherman before he was born. Before she married. What must she have felt to have given that up for his father? Was it the same? Hunting for deals instead of fish?

  The heel of his staff clunked on a bit of wood. Otto stopped to look at it, and it looked back at him. He blinked and saw it was just a bit of wood, but the sense of something in it made him slip one mitten off and lean down to pick it up. It had a kind of sinuous shape, like a swimming shark. He could see where the dorsal fin and tail would be. The thought pleased him, so he tucked the bit of wood into the gather bag and, slipping his mitten back on, continued down the beach.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Aram’s Inlet

  December 8, 2304

  “Do you suppose it’s something on the Southern Reaches?” Tony asked in the latest round of guesswork.

  “Why would they want us off the planet for that?” Jimmy asked. “There’s nobody down there, and half the year it’s a frozen wasteland! They could have a huge facility spewing waste carbon into the atmosphere and we’d never know.”

  “So it has to be something here on the Western Reaches.” Tony started down the well-worn speculation path once again. “Something they want to do with the continent that’s not consistent with having us all here.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “It doesn’t seem possible that it’s something on the planet. It has to be outside of here.”

  “Why?” Tony asked.

  “Well, call it a failure of imagination, but I can’t think of anything they could want down here, except the food. The initial asset surveys were pretty clear. Ore’s out, and even if it weren’t, they wouldn’t need to close down the fisheries and the farms,” Jimmy said.

  “Something toxic?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe. And maybe it’s something they’re gonna bring down, but we’re talking about a management company that handles–what? Five corporate planets just in the Dunsany Sector? Gods know how many in the Western Annex. They’re really only interested in one thing.”

  “Money,” Tony said.

  “Exactly.” Jimmy slapped his desk in emphasis. “So where’s the money?”

  “Not in product. Not in manpower. They’re not getting enough incremental value from rising food prices to offset the nose dive in stock value,” Tony ticked them off on his fingers.

  “What’s important enough to bug Violet’s office?”

  “Crime, or really big money,” Tony said. “And do we know they’re not bugging us?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “I’m assuming they have, but it’s just not worth looking for.”

  Tony’s eyebrows shot up. “Should we be talking about this here, then?”

  Jimmy laughed. “What? And hide the fact that we’re totally clueless? I think they figured that out already.”

  Tony shrugged. “Good point. But it’s a nice day out, let’s go get an early lunch and maybe drink ourselves into a stupor for the afternoon.”

  Jimmy laughed. “Okay, good idea.”

  The two men got their parkas and left the rather shabby building that served as Pirano Fisheries World Headquarters on St. Cloud. Nothing more than a prefab three-story utili-build, the sun and wind had taken a toll on the exterior finish. After almost a century, it still looked passable, if a bit scrubbed up around the edges. Most of the business support staff was scattered across the South Coast and linked by the ’Net, so there wasn’t any real need for a large central office and nobody to impress with an imposing edifice.

  As they made their way down Quayside, the sun glinted off the small crusts of snow blown into the corners, and the smell of cold ocean washed over them. They turned the corner and headed along East Birch for Barney’s Beanery. Jimmy liked Barney’s because of the combination of coffee and soups that Barney offered up during the winter. Barney’s wife, Gizelle, was crew on one of the boats during the season, but when the fleet was in for the winter, she became the chief soup chef and bread baker. Barney made most of his money over the winter months, largely because everybody knew about the fresh soups, stews, chowders, and breads.

  The sparkling cold day gained little heat from the brilliant sunshine. Icy wind funneled between the low buildings on either side. They huddled in their jackets, hiking briskly along, trying to move fast enough to keep warm against the bite of the wind.

  Tony said, “So? Anything from Andrew?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “He’s pretty sure the point is to drive the price of the stock down so somebody can buy up the St. Cloud combine. There’s nothing in any of the other Allied holdings that’s even similar, and certainly nothing like this in Umber.”

  “Do we know for sure?”

  Jimmy shrugged. “As nearly as anybody can know without a face-to-face meeting, I guess, but it’s hard to say. I got a flash from Angela last night on the private, family address,” Jimmy said. “Unless they’re a lot more insinuated than we think, that should be secure.”

  “If they’ve compromised the ’Net...” Tony suggested.

  “Oh, I’m assuming they’ve compromised the ’Net. But they’d have to have broken the family codes, too.”

  “You encrypt your family messages?” Tony asked.

  “Don’t you?” Jimmy shot back with a grin. The tip of his nose was getting numb and the wind seemed to be cutting right through his jacket and washing across his bare back.

  Tony shrugged. “All my family is on planet. We don’t talk much.”

  Jimmy grinned.

  They walked in silence for another tick.

  “So, who’s trying to buy the planet?” Tony asked. “And why are Shyster, Shyster, and Sue Me dr
iving the price down if all they want is money?”

  “It makes no sense,” Jimmy said, “but it has to be rational. There’s a logical reason here we just can’t see.”

  Tony stopped dead in his tracks and Jimmy took two more steps before he realized it.

  “It’s too obvious,” Tony said.

  “What’s too obvious?”

  “Who’s buying the planet.”

  Jimmy looked at his friend. “Who’s buying the planet is too obvious?”

  Tony grinned. “It’s so stupidly simple, we just never saw it.”

  Jimmy blinked. “I still don’t see it.”

  “We have a group of money grubbing lawyers running a management outfit,” Tony said.

  “Yup.” Jimmy nodded, and they started walking again.

  “They seem hell-bent on either destroying a cash-cow or driving the planetary coop out of business.”

  “Yup,” Jimmy said again.

  “They’re going to lose money if they keep it up.”

  “Yup,” Jimmy said.

  “But they haven’t lost very much, if any yet.”

  That startled Jimmy, but his gaze turned inward as he considered the situation. “A little minor fluctuation in the stock price. That’s not real money, is it.”

  “Nope,” Tony agreed. “We’re assuming they want to sell the company and make the money on the deal, but it doesn’t make sense. In the first place, they’d want to make the most money, which means increasing the value of the shares.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “But they don’t own that many shares. The family still has controlling interest.”

  Tony nodded. “They only have a few percent of the stock. So how are they going to make money by selling the company?”

  Jimmy blinked as he caught up with the logic. “They’d get a commission on the sale, but it has to be approved by the board.”

  “What if the board doesn’t approve?”

  “Then they’re left with an empty planet, assuming they follow through with this quota thing,” Jimmy said.